


Ten Thoughts During Mutiny

by RockPaperbackScissors



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Confessions, Demisexuality, F/M, First Time, Ilos, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-12 06:31:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7089085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RockPaperbackScissors/pseuds/RockPaperbackScissors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the mission on Ilos, Kaidan makes up his mind to tell Shepard how he feels. It turns out to be just one of the many things that they've been holding back from each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ten Thoughts During Mutiny

The cabin doors open. Their hiss sounds like a sigh tonight, as though the ship itself questions his judgment. _An order: Calm down. Focus on why you came here._ Shepard is seated at the desk in the corner of the cabin, arms crossed, eyes half-closed. 

“Commander?”

She stands with the readiness of a soldier perpetually on the verge of duty. Her drooping shoulders reveal what that mindset has done to her. “You… probably shouldn’t call me that, Kaidan. I shouldn’t even be wearing this uniform.” She shrugs, the gesture of an insect reluctant to open its wings against the breeze. He wants to cup his hands around her, protect her from whatever they’re hurtling into.

Instead, he takes three unhurried steps in her direction. He stops short before they touch. “If I didn’t believe you were doing the right thing, I wouldn’t be here.”

_A concession: She hates platitudes, but she hates them less when they come from him._

“If the mission on Ilos doesn’t go well, I want you to know…” He folds his arms as he tries to narrow down the list of things he wants her to know. “I’ve enjoyed serving under you.”

Her bloodshot eyes rove across his face. She takes in the little details that she’s tallied a hundred times before with all the tireless idleness of a miser: the downward tug of his lips, the shadowed gold of his irises, the dimple on his chin. “Stay with me, Kaidan.” _A doubt: What the hell drove her to say that?_

“Is that an order?”

There’s laughter in his voice, but she can feel the familiar smothering weight of responsibility and regulations. “No,” she sighs. “It’s wishful thinking.” 

Before she can turn away, he kisses her. He finds that her lips taste of warmth and whiskey. _A question: Am I out of line?_

He kisses her again, more slowly. _A confession: The day he met her, he had known that he would love her._

She’s motionless. She tries to remember what people are expected to do in these situations. Hesitantly, she lets her tongue brush his lower lip. _An admission: The day she met him, she had felt nothing._

He pulls back and looks into her eyes. With the lightest of touches, his thumb traces her cheekbone and then her brow. She gingerly eases her arms around his neck. Through the close-fitting fabric of his uniform, she can feel the warm solidity of his muscles. As her fingers follow the valley that runs along his spine, she is reminded of gravity and canyons and Planet Earth, the birthplace of her species, the place she has hardly known but has always longed for. Or has she been longing for something else? 

_A memory of hers: A krogan battlemaster consumes her field of vision. Her ears ring as blows rain down on her shoulders and skull. Just before she blacks out, the krogan is hurled far overhead, enveloped in the flickering blue-white electricity that radiates out of Kaidan’s outstretched hands._

She seizes him more tightly and he responds in kind, sliding a hand under her shirt. She gasps at the feeling of someone else’s skin against her own. It sends tingles rippling through her, as unfathomable as the surging of mountains from the meeting of tectonic plates. The roughness of his stubble against her neck makes her grin in spite of everything, vaporizing the worries that had clung to her a moment earlier. He holds her tighter and lifts her off the floor.

_A memory of his: He’s barely conscious and the world is upside down. He’s dimly aware that she has hoisted him off the ground and slung him across her shoulders. The last he sees of Virmire is water, water everywhere.… How did the rest of that poem go? Ashley would know…_

When they stagger into the bed, she wants to laugh, he wants to sob. Neither of them could explain how they got here. When he pulls away her shirt and looks down at her bare torso, he’s taken aback for a moment. The survival of life throughout the galaxy hinges on her, and here she is with him, all soft skin and slender bones and warm blood, as fragile as any other member of their species. 

“What’s wrong?” she asks. She looks up at him with wide, thirsty eyes. She reaches out and runs a hand through his hair. It’s dense and rough, and she delights in seeing it unruly at last. _A secret: She’s rehearsed that motion in her mind too many times before._

“I don’t know, Co—Shepard. We’ve lost so much already. It comes with the territory, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I think about losing you and I can’t stand it.”

She bites the inside of her cheek. She has never been able to give confidence that she didn’t feel herself, and the whirlwind of thoughts inside her only makes it harder now.

“We’ll just have to be careful not to lose each other then, won’t we?” She pulls him close and wraps her arms and legs around him, kissing him with an urgency beyond anything she’s felt on the battlefield. 

_A truth: She’s watchedcenturies-old newsvids of the day that humans first set foot on Earth’s moon, and wondered how they must have felt. To have gazed for so long at that constant distant presence, and to have at last made it your own, however briefly. Now, finally, she understands._


End file.
